Hail Mary
by the daroga
Summary: Vignettecharacter study of a mother and son.


I didn't tell anyone where I was going.  
  
I knew they wouldn't let me if I did. The journey was bad enough: "That's too far, Madeleine," they'd say. "What is it you want, so far away? What do you need that God cannot provide for you right here?" The sisters were fortunate in their faith, you see. I had no such trust that God was looking out for any of us.  
  
I still believed in Him, though. More than ever now that my child was gone. My eyes had been clouded by the devil I thought I saw in him, but as the memory of his face faded I realized that he had been sent to test me. When I failed and Erik ran away, I gave myself to God in the only way I knew how; I went back to the convent where I had spent the early years of my life. I knew that I could never be forgiven, though the sisters were as incapable of looking through my apparent innocence as I had been of seeing past his hideousness. They took me in and prayed for my dead husband and poor, dead child and I kept my actions dutiful and tried to keep my thoughts so. I alone knew it was not enough. He had been sent to test me for a reason; because I was vain, perhaps, or spoiled, or took God's favor for granted. One might say that I had paid for these trivial sins, but I was not so certain. I was not so cured of my vanity that I did not wish for another chance to prove myself perfect to God. I only lacked the opportunity.  
  
Opportunity showed itself on a rainy Monday: market day. I had been sent with a younger student of the convent into town to obtain fresh vegetables from the farmers and merchants who gathered every week. I was often put into this role of chaperone, based on the foolish notion that my age had brought me wisdom and responsibility.  
  
As we were walking past the stalls the drizzle that had been coming down all day became rain, and we took refuge under the canvas roof of the tinker's stand. I had seen him before: he would show up every few weeks and mend pots and other bits and pieces and tell stories of what he'd seen. His life on the road, he said, made him lonely and talkative when he got into civilized country. When we arrived he was regaling a few housewives with tales of his last journey, and I found myself listening despite myself. We gossiped at the convent, of course, but it was discouraged and there was never much to gossip about anyway.  
  
"Gypsies? Here?" one of the women was saying, as if she was wondering whether she ought to rush home at that moment to make certain her children were still there.  
  
"Yes m'am, none too far either, but they won't come round this way. It's fair season and they're sticking close to the larger towns so's they can get a good crowd. And let me tell you, they won't have much trouble this year. I never seen a show like what they got. The most incredible freak I ever laid eyes on." One of the women recoiled slightly, and the student was pulling on my sleeve to go but I shushed her distractedly, fixed to the spot. There was a horrible suspicion building within me, or was it only my imagination? "Yes m'am, hideous he is. Most sorry excuse for a person I ever seen, though I'll spare you good ladies the particulars. But that's not all. They got 'im fixed up in this coffin, with lilies and all, and he sings, only you'd swear it was the flowers doin' the singing. Nothing that sings that beautiful can have a face like that. And another thing."  
  
I didn't hear the rest. The sound of blood rushing in my ears seemed to block out all other noise. Thoughts raced around my head but there was only one coherent one: Erik is alive. Erik is alive and this man has seen him.  
  
I could not stay to listen, to hear my son examined and picked apart by these people, so I let the younger woman pull me away from the stand. I wanted to go straight back to the convent to collect myself, but I followed her around in a daze while she finish the shopping. I ignored her repeated questions about what was wrong, until I finally told her I was only a little cold and wanted to go back. But going back did not make my thoughts any easier.  
  
I'd spent the last two years trying not to think about my son. How anyone could forget him after once seeing his face, let alone living with him, is incomprehensible, but I felt that if only I could begin to, I could go on with my life. He'd made the past ten years a living hell, but I had done no better for him. And the uncertainty of where he was or if he still lived plagued my thoughts daily. Some days I prayed that he was dead, as if that would end both of our sufferings. And other days. other days I prayed he was alive and well and that I would find him again and be for him what he'd needed and I had been unwilling or unable to provide.  
  
God had finally answered one of my prayers.  
  
I was quiet all through the chores and prayers and activities of the day, weighing my options, but I had made up my mind without fully knowing it almost instantly. Surely I was meant to hear the tinker's story, and once hearing, what was there to do but follow? My son, my only son, was in pain. I did not wish to think of him in front of those people, forced to make a living by selling himself because his mother could not provide for him. It made me feel sick to know that I had driven him to this. I, who had tried to shield him from the world that I knew would hate him, was the reason he was discussed on street corners and tinker's tents like a performing animal.  
  
There really was no choice to be made.  
  
The sisters always rose early, but I who had not slept that night was able to steal away before dawn. I took nothing with me but a bit of money I had secreted when I first joined the convent, I suppose because my vanity had not allowed me to turn everything over to the Church as was proper. I didn't know where I was going or how I would get there, but I knew someone who did. The tinker was cooking his breakfast over a fire when I found his campsite on the edge of town. He looked up surprised when I approached and I bore myself as regally as I could. I was getting older but I was not yet completely unattractive and I wanted no trouble.  
  
"I want you to take me to the gypsies," I told him commandingly. "I have money enough to pay you for the service."  
  
He looked up at me, perplexed. "Why d'you want to see the gypsies, m'am? They're not fit company for the likes of you."  
  
"My reasons do not matter," I told him. "Will you take me? Yes or no will do; if you won't I must find another who will and I cannot wait for you to make up your mind."  
  
He nodded slowly. "I'll take you m'am, if you're that bent on going. It ain't but a day's drive from here, if I'm not mistaken. When did you want to be leaving?"  
  
"As soon as possible." I looked down at the bacon frying on the fire. "You may finish your breakfast, if you wish." I felt as though I would never be hungry again.  
  
I sat on a nearby rock as he hurriedly fished the hot bacon out of the grease, shoved it into his mouth, and rinsed out the pan. I rose and attempted to pay him, but as my hands went to my purse the tinker shook his head. "Let me get you there first, m'lady."  
  
The journey was fairly short, taking less than a day. But it was tedious. The tinker, glad for company but made nervous by either my perceived status or my reserve babbled incessantly, and I could do nothing but make noncommittal gestures at regular intervals. I heard nothing of what he said, though every so often I caught part of a question meant to probe my strange determination to visit the gypsies. My mind was filled with thoughts of Erik, my body taut as one of the strings of his violin at the thought of seeing him again. To say I was nervous would be to greatly understate the matter. Between the memories of what I had done and doubt about what I could do now, I felt fairly paralyzed.  
  
But I would do it, I resolved. I had been ready to save him, to save both of us, the night he ran away. I had been determined then, but I had been too late. Now I was catching up with him, and I would not be eluded so easily. Whatever curse God had placed on us, Erik deserved a mother, and I had never been she. But I could be.  
  
"Here we are then, m'am," said my companion, pulling up his horse. I was shaken from my reverie and realized that we were on the outskirts of a sort of transient city; wagons and tents and campfires ringed a central clearing where even now a fair-sized crowd milled about. I gave the man far more money than the service necessarily required and moved to get down from his cart. "See here m'am, I'm nervous about letting you stay here all alone. They're a rough crowd, and light-fingered too."  
  
"I will be careful. You needn't worry."  
  
"If you want me to stay, m'am, I'd be happy to."  
  
"That won't be necessary," I said haughtily. If I was going to take my son with me anywhere, it would have to be in secret. I could not risk the tinker, whose mouth hardly stopped moving, knowing what had happened to the fair's star attraction.  
  
"Even so, m'am, I ain't moving until the morning. Can't get much further than this today. So if you're needing anything, I'll be right here." I bid him farewell and thank you and turned to the circle of gypsy wagons.  
  
Vendors and musicians and performers lay in wait to command the attention of any and all who walked by, but I ignored them in my single-minded determination to do what I had come here for. The unnamed fear I felt I pushed down hard. I felt strong and righteous. Surely God was watching me now. Surely He knew what I meant to do and loved me for it. Surely I would be forgiven.  
  
It was not difficult to find him. A small crowd was gathering in back of a wagon with a curtain rigged up across the opening. A barker stood to the side, calling one and all to see the magnificent singing corpse, promising exquisite beauty and despairing ugliness all in the same package. I had come just in time for the show.  
  
I had not anticipated watching. I only wanted to find him and draw him away from this filthy, horrible life. To give him what I ought to have promised from the beginning; the life of any other human child. Oh, things would be different this time. I knew it, deep down. No more excuses, no more selfish refusal to take on the burdens I had been given. I loved him, with a certainty and depth that could not fail to do what was right. But I had not wanted to see him before this crowd. Now that I was here, however, I could not turn away. Even were I not compelled, it would be cowardly. I had to stay and watch and know what my son had endured if I was to save him from it.  
  
I stayed towards the back of the crowd. I did not know what he would do when he saw me. We had not parted well; we had not begun well, either. I wanted privacy for our meeting, and a chance to convince him that things had changed. I could not afford him seeing me like this.  
  
The crowd was growing, and the barker waited a few minutes as word spread around the camp and others arrived. "I warn you, fair ladies and gentlemen, that this is not a sight for the weak or the young. Nothing you have seen had prepared you for this. I must ask you to leave now if you are prone to fainting or hysteria. We can't be held responsible for what the sight of the worst Nature has to offer might do." The crowd around me giggled nervously, but stood their ground, knowing the speech was hyperbole meant only to key them up and make them more susceptible. The gypsy and I alone knew it was not.  
  
The murmur increased slightly when the curtain was drawn away and a plain black coffin became visible. I wondered if I could withstand the reaction of the crowd; strength to take Erik back was one thing, but strength to stand by and watch as my son was gawked at and ridiculed was quite another. I could not make my feet move from their spot, however. I had been drawn in like the rest, and I stayed.  
  
The coffin opened, seemingly of its own accord, but I had experience enough of Erik's skill with machines and devices to know that nothing anyone saw here tonight would be magic. No, I knew that God did not need magic to work in mysterious ways. Neither did Erik.  
  
My first sight of him was not what I had expected. He was clothed entirely in black, except for the mask which I had sewn for him. I had been anticipating his face, steeling myself for the sight of it. They must save the coup de grace for the end, I thought bitterly. It was difficult to see anything other than his hands and the mask and the single white lily he held across his chest. He stood perfectly still.  
  
And so did the crowd.  
  
There was no noise, and he had not yet even done anything. He had silenced them with his appearance, masked as it was. I knew instinctively that he was no longer the boy who had run away. There was something at work here, something I could not define.  
  
When he began to sing, I had to bite my lip to keep the tears from flowing. How had I forgotten that voice? I had thought that it remained in my memory forever, but on hearing it now I realized that my merely human mind could not recreate that sound. My body ached for it now, and I wondered how I had lived these years without it. How I had ever considered it impure or evil. The devil could never have created anything so wonderful.  
  
I was insensible to the rest of the crowd. Everything but the two of us seemed to recede into some unimportant background, less real than the boy in the coffin, sending up his plea to God to grant us peace through a cheap trick with a flower that, in his hands, seemed a miracle. I loved him more than ever. It wasn't the artificial love he had wrung out of me all those years ago, either. That had been a cheap trick. But I was not the same witless, harrowed mother I had been then, seeking escape in insanity, and he was no longer the isolated and petulant child who found he could manipulate what he wanted from an unloving parent. This was real. This was a love worthy of God's forgiveness. As he sang, I envisioned our reunion. He would know, without my explaining it, that things had changed. That all would be different. He would know that God had smiled on both of us at last. And I would care for him and love him and together we would make a normal life for ourselves. We could free each other, me from the prison of my repentance and him from the chains of his servitude to a crude public who would never understand the extent of his gifts. Both of us would be forgiven, and God would never-  
  
And then he stopped singing. In the complete silence that followed he threw the lily carelessly away and let it lie without life on the ground. The spell was broken. Oh, the crowd was still transfixed, some of them with silent tears coursing down their faces. They had never heard anything like this and they would never forget it as long as they lived. They would never experience anything the way they had before, because they had something divine and untouchable to compare every tawdry moment of their lives to. And I still loved him. But I knew with an aching certainty that I had been betrayed by God's false promise. I knew in the way he moved now, standing free of the coffin, taller than when he had left me and with the beginnings of a man's strength. I knew in the line of his hands, so expressive when you knew him, as they tossed the flower aside. And I knew in the way his crooked mouth smiled, discernable only to me who knew that face so well, when he removed the mask and surveyed the astonished crowd with the cold glow of triumph in his eyes.  
  
He had found what I could never give him. He had found power. And he loved it more fiercely than he had ever loved me.  
  
What could his poor mother offer that could compare? Maternal love? The intangible promise of God's forgiveness? A woman's protection? He needed none of it. It was not God's love that shown darkly from him now as he bowed mockingly to the gathering, but in his mind and soul and clever hands it would serve. He had no need of my promises, and suddenly knew that I had none to make. If God had led me here, it had been on a fool's errand, and my faith felt bitter and unconvincing even to me. Erik was no longer my son, no longer a boy content with the crumbs of his mother's resentful attentions. He was a man who had tasted something I had denied him and he belonged only to the world that he himself would create. The devil had never found a more apt servant or master. After all that had happened, he had found salvation in the very thing that I had been convinced would damn him forever and I could not deny him his peace even if I condemned us both.  
  
I turned to go, not knowing or caring whether he saw me. He would not care either; we were beyond such things now. I would return as I must, silent and beaten, to the convent. God had lost. But Erik had not. And I could no longer say for certain which side I was on. 


End file.
